The ‘Financial Stability of the Euro Area as a Whole’: Between Jurisdiction and Veridiction

Through the concepts of jurisdiction and veridiction, Foucault conceptualised the different relations that markets and law have had throughout times. During the pre-modern era, the market was heavily regulated. Legal-locution through politics (jurisdiction) defined, for example, what was the just price for a given product. During the modern era the role of markets changed. Now, markets function as a site of truthlocution (veridiction). The markets, through formation of market prices, define what is good government. This article takes the European Court of Justice’s judgement in C-62/14 Gauweiler as an example of the interplay between the forces of legal-locution and market-veridiction. The case concerned the European Central Bank’s government bond purchasing programme. A central element of this programme, and also the condition for its legality, was that it does not interfere with the logic of the markets and retains the Member States’ impetus to follow sound budgetary policy. The analysis reveals how the European Central Bank had to use legal-locution to make marketveridiction work because the markets were acting irrationally. The case is thus a paramount example of Foucault’s maxim: ‘One must govern for the market, rather than because of the market.’